


"Walking Between  Worlds"

by aura218



Series: How it Happened [2]
Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: 50s, Coming Out, M/M, Post-Series, San Francisco, gentleman doctors, how it happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-08
Updated: 2012-01-25
Packaged: 2017-10-30 03:10:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/327115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aura218/pseuds/aura218
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Go back in time to the years right after the war, before B.J. and  Hawkeye were Gentleman Doctors, when the boys were stepping out of their shells  into all the world could offer. Part 2 of a 4 part arc.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Title: "Walking Between Worlds"  
  
  
  
Author: [](http://aura218.livejournal.com/profile)[**aura218**](http://aura218.livejournal.com/)  
  
  
  
Pairing: Hawkeye/B.J.  
  
  
  
Genre: PG13, romance, coming out, 50s, postwar, San Francisco  
  
  
  
Summary: Go back in time to the years right after the war, before B.J. and Hawkeye were Gentleman Doctors, when the boys were stepping out of their shells into all the world could offer. Part 2 of a 4 part arc.

  


Timeline: 1955-56  
  
Part of the Gentleman Doctors series  
  
Part 2/4 of the How it Happened arc

  


Read  
[Part One: When the Wind Blows the Stars](http://ficbyaura218.livejournal.com/5654.html#cutid1)

  


  


"Walking Between Worlds"

  


Chapter 1/4

  


 

  


When B.J. came home from his trip down the rabbit hole in Crabapple Cove, he knew it was over between he and Peg. He just didn't know how to tell her. 

  


The worst part was that he hadn't missed her while he'd been away. He brought Erin a plastic lobster for tubby time and a stuffed fish to cuddle and a doll dressed like an Indian girl, which she promptly stripped nude. He felt guilty that he'd only brought Peg dish towels with giant lobsters on them. When Peg opened the gift, they looked obscene in her trendy, pastel kitchen. 

  


"I'm sorry," he said. 

  


"I love them," she said. "They're perfect for cooking out at the beach house." She put them under the sink.

  


The Stinson beach house -- another complication. A divorce was going to be expensive. This whole thing was a tangled web and it would be easier to just stay home. But lying in bed with Peg, just as uninterested in her as he'd felt before, moreso because he was now palpably aware of who he'd rather be with, was an agony he couldn't live with for twenty or forty more years. B.J. couldn't put into words why he moved into the guest room. He couldn't lay in bed with her and play pretend. During the day, they put on a show for Erin, but after she was asleep, they looked at one another across the short history of their marriage.

  


B.J. closed the closet with a click. He could see her in the mirrored door, watching him while she pulled her nightie over her head. 

  


"Peggy--"

  


"Don't." She pulled away from him. She cried when she was angry and when she was sad, so B.J. didn't know if he should hug her or keep a safe distance. He used to know his pretty, sweet girl better.

  


"I'm sorry," he said. "I needed to get away and think --"

  


"And you decided that you don't love me anymore." She was digging for an answer -- or a fight. 

  


B.J. sat on the hamper in the hall. He watched Peggy get out of bed and sit at her vanity, smear on cold cream, and wipe it off. Her face was fresh and she looked younger without her makeup, more like the college girl he remembered. Something was different in her looks; a little more slender in the face, sharper in her eyes. She hadn't given up work when he had come home. Her real estate job was pulling in half the mortgage monthly, had been for almost a year. He took her hand and led her down the short hall to the living room. They'd sit and discuss this like civilized people. On couches.

  


"Is it the war?" Peg said. "Is that what you and Hawkeye talked about? This was supposed to be our happy ending, you know. You were supposed to come home and we'd have a normal life." 

  


More children. She was supposed to be pregnant by now, that was the plan.

  


B.J. shook his head. "It's not the war. I'm just different, honey. You are too."

  


Peggy aggressively picked up his scattered newspaper from the couch and carpet. "I don't understand why we can't be different together! I expected to grow old with you -- emphasis on _grow_. No one said we were supposed to be the same people all our lives."

  


B.J. took the crumpled newspaper from her. "I know, Peg, but it doesn't always work out.

  


She was angry-crying.  "Other couples are separated, not everyone gets divorced after a war. This isn't fair, B.J., you don't give up when it gets hard."

  


B.J. crunched the paper together and stuck it in the magazine rack. He took her by the hands, but she pulled away. He saw her point. It wasn't a thing he hadn't accused himself of. His parents had made it work, hers had too. 

  


"Peggy." He sighed. He could tell her what he'd been up to, but it could jeopardize his right to see Erin. But she had a right to know. "Peggy, I think I may be a homosexual."

  


Peggy stared. "Well, sweetheart, that's no reason to get divorced."

  


B.J. goggled at her. 

  


"Honey, I've known this about you for a long time," she said.

  


B.J. stared. "No, you didn't. You couldn't -- why would you marry me!"

  


Peggy smiled, looking far more smug that he thought she had a right to. "B.J., there have been men in your past. Do you think you're the only man in the world who was able to chose a wife and family over his problem?"

  


B.J. huffed his last breath of air. He was done. Dead. She killed him. "Who?"

  


"Oh, boys we knew in college."

  


"Leo? Peggy, we were friends!"

  


Peg pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and daintily dabbed her teary cheeks. "I wasn't going to suggest him, but it's interesting your subconscious mind goes to him."

  


He pointed. "Too much reading for you. Watch more television."

  


Peggy smiled. "That's a Leo-phrase."

  


He wasn't listening. Chose? Could he do that? He'd told Hawkeye he could. Peg knew him better than anyone.

  


"B.J.," she said. "Erin needs a father. I need a husband who I can rely on, not someone who will run out when his emotions get the better of him. The time for you to discover yourself is long over. I am things. You should know who you are by now."

  


Like it's so easy? he thought. Who was she to say when a person got to be done, like a three minute egg? Her eggs were always runny.

  


"I'm sorry, Peg, but I can't live my life on your schedule. And I won't."

  


They argued. She was right, really. He deeply wished he could be the husband she deserved, the man who had stood up at the altar and swore before God and their families he would always be there, semper fi. But he lost that man in Korea. Life had happened. Even if he was attracted to her, he wasn't in love with her. She threw a deck of cards at him when he said that, but at least she understood. 

  


He moved out the next day.

  


*

  


His house was too big and too green. He painted it yellow. He missed Erin. It took him a month to make pork chops without burning the breading, himself, or the pan. He was bored. He was lonely. He bought a second-hand portable TV set. 

  


He and Peggy agreed to rent the Stinson Beach house and split the income. 

  


B.J.'s lawyer said Peg's lawyer was being very reasonable about alimony and child support. He saw Erin for four days every ten days.

  


He kicked himself nightly for throwing away the cards in his hand for a deck he didn't know how to deal. 

  


*

  


_Dear H,_

  


_I did it, I moved out. I filed papers and everything._

  


_This picture postcard is of the Pink Ladies. My house is a few blocks north and looks sort of like them, but not as pretty. I did Erin's room in mint green, she picked it, well, she picked from my selections. I let her sign her name in the corner, two little squiggles and a triangle. It means "Erin's room at Daddy's, please stay out, is it lunchtime yet?"_

  


_Miss you._

  


_Love, B_

  


*

  


B.J.'s new neighborhood was across the bay from Mill Valley and above Eureka Valley, thirty minutes from both, an even straddle between Erin and this new thing in his life he still didn't understand. It was September, 1955, there were no obvious answers, no official literature he could study. He fired his analyst and three in succession until he decided to handle his nervous condition alone. He stopped going to church because a meeting with his pastor had him briefly convinced he was at worst a monster and at best destined to alcoholism and suicide. He missed the ritual of Sunday -- not only studying God's word, but having a place where he felt welcome and safe. He felt at loose ends without a weekly recentering, like a car that needed its transmission balanced.

  


So one Sunday afternoon, he took the cable car south and got off at Mission and Castro, the dusty, spread out neighborhood he only knew by whispered innuendo. He stood indecisively in front of a Woolworths where he was eyed by a giggling coterie of teenage Negro girls with beehived hair. The block looked like it had never recovered from the great earthquake when B.J. was a kid in the 30s. Some of the side streets weren't paved. He walked quickly past a barren lot in which a clutch of homeless men lounged on a rusted car and passed a bottle. 

  


This was it: Eureka Valley. Where the blue discharges were said to frequent. Where his mother used to tell him nice people had no reason to go -- for the poverty moreso than any unconventional sexual activities. He passed a warehouse, a faded brick bank, but no blinking sign that said "Homosexuals, Welcome Here!" So he kept walking.

  


He didn't know what drew him to the diner called The Lighthouse. It looked like any other lunch counter in any city in the country. He was hungry, the menu was visible from the street. Maybe the literary reference pinged the back of his mind, although Woolf had never been his favorite. It just seemed a welcoming beacon. 

  


B.J. sat at the counter and waited for the young waiter to work his way over. He smiled to two men having coffee at the back of the shop -- they looked away. B.J. broke eye contact, flushing heat. They must have been businessmen, they were speaking in low tones with their heads together.  The boy brought B.J. his ice tea -- oh. The soft face belonged to a girl in blue jeans, a rolled man's shirt, and unfashionably shingled hair. 

  


"Th-thank you," he said, but she bussed to another customer too quickly. He almost called her back -- the glass was hot from the dishwasher, melting the ice quickly. But she ignored him.

  


A willowy thing brought him the rest of his order -- a most unquestionably female figure pretty in pink, so now he was confused. As B.J. ate his burger, he took in the crowd. He was starting to feel like a pariah. The businessmen looked away when his eye caught theirs. They're not businessmen, he thought. At least, not business partners. Look at their legs crossed toward one another, look at how they bicker over the bill. You're in the right place; they can't advertise any more than you can.

  


_God_ , how do homosexuals get to know one another? Let alone date? Was this the kind of fearful life he really wanted? Not for the first time, he felt homesick for his old life. 

  


"Anything else?" It was that first waitress who gave him a warm ice tea glass.

  


"No, thanks," B.J. said. How could he tell her that he was one of her? He remembered his Sunday school teacher telling him about fish symbol; how early Christians used to draw it in the dirt to identify one another. To anyone else it meant "where is the fish monger?" 

  


"Where are you from?" she said.

  


B.J. blinked. "Here. San Francisco. I was from Mill Valley."

  


"Was?" She leaned against the sideboard, thumbs in her jeans. 

  


"I just moved to North Beach," he said. "I'm divorced. The war . . . " he made a vague gesture.

  


She nodded. "I'm Jo. And that's Bette." The pretty, willowy waitress smiled at him from the corner. Jo put out her hand. 

  


He shook it. She shook like a man. "B.J." 

  


She poured him a refill of cold ice tea. "You look like you're on a mission, B.J."

  


B.J. poked his French fry in ketchup. "I thought I was. I heard stories about Eureka Valley."

  


"This dump?"

  


B.J. laughed. "It's not quite what I expected."

  


"Lot of servicemen around here," Jo said.

  


B.J. looked down at his plate. His nerves were jittering. "Yeah. I heard. I was wondering if there was a place . . . if, you know, since you work here --"

  


"I'm the owner."

  


B.J. felt his face flush. "Right. Um. A bar, I guess. That former servicemen frequent."

  


Jo's stony expressed softened into something like a smile. "Asa!" she barked. 

  


B.J. jumped. Jo reminded him of his third grade teacher who once made him throw up over a spelling test. An older man shuffled up to the counter. 

  


"You rang, my sweet?" he said. His body was shaped like the letter D and his nose took up half his face. 

  


"Gentleman wants to go to the Black Cat," she said.

  


Asa looked B.J. over. "Are you sure?"

  


"C'mon, old man, he's local." 

  


B.J.'s head had been snapping between this exchange like a ping pong spectator's. "Look, if there's some problem --"

  


"Sure there is," Asa rooted in his corduroy coat pockets. "I don't pop these tokens out of my ass like a vending machine." 

  


"Excuse me?" Maybe B.J. had gone into the wrong luncheonette after all.

  


"Don't scare the fresh hatched fairies," Jo said. 

  


B.J. almost took offense at that. But she didn't say the slur in a mean way. After all, she was in the life more than he was.

  


Asa produced a wooden nickel from his pocket and pressed it into B.J.'s palm. One either side was printed a black cat, Halloween decoration style.

  


"You take that to the door, sonny," Asa said, "and tell them I sent you. But if they've forgotten who I am, you're on your own."

  


Community service performed, Asa shuffled back to the window table with his friend ("friend"?), another elderly man who was one big liver spot. 

  


"Thank you?" B.J. said.

  


Asa waved an orangutan's arm. 

  


"Don't mention it," Jo said. "Ever."

  


"What is this place?" B.J. said. "And where is it?"

  


Jo flipped B.J.'s check over and wrote an address. "End of the rainbow, soldier boy. All the men you could want and most of the men you'd do best to accept no gifts from."

  


"It's mostly about community," said Bette while she cleared dishes to B.J.'s right. "Even if you don't meet the man of your dreams, at least you meet other people like us."

  


Jo smiled at her affectionately. "That's my college girl."

  


When B.J. stepped into the street, he felt like he'd been given keys to a secret world, one he wasn't sure he was prepared to enter. What was he getting into? What if someone saw him? He'd have a criminal record, be fired and unemployable. Peg would hate him and he'd never see Erin again. 

  


He didn't care. Well, he did, but he was more afraid of doing nothing about his new problem than he was of going forward. Isolation and loneliness was an imposing prison.

  


He realized Jo had written directions to a bookstore below the address to the bar. It was down a cobblestone side street, up a hill so steep the mortar between the cobbles rolled down. When B.J. turned around, he could see the cable cars running between the blocks and the smoke rising up between them. He briefly fell in love with his pretty, filthy, diverse city. 

  


The bookstore was in the bottom floor of a house. 

  


B.J. had always felt comfortable with books. As a kid, he'd been laid up with scarlet fever for three months and when he was well enough, his mother had supplied him with a steady stack of adventure novels that he read voraciously -- down the Mississippi and sliced through the jungles of India. 

  


At first, B.J. wasn't sure why he'd been directed to this shop, he knew so many of the normal, popular authors. But then, a literary purity veil parted: B.J. realized he was finding secret worlds he'd never known: Walt Whitman, also a homo? Proust, Vidal, Cather, Taylor, Dickenson? This bookstore wasn't about exploring places, but people, their lives, experiences. These homosexual people had written their secrets into their work and here they were, on shelves in bookstores and school libraries, hiding in plain sight. Of course, not all of the books were as readily available.

  


He'd loved _Go Tell it On the Mountain_ but had never heard of _Giovanni's Room_. The language was some of the most lyrical he'd ever read; he kept wanting to turn to Hawkeye and read a passage aloud. And then there was the nonfiction, a less . . . legitimate section. It was kept in back, behind a black curtain; B.J. found a handwritten, mimeographed pamphlet. For a nickel it answered all the questions he had about homo sex but had been too embarrassed to make Hawkeye tell him. He read the whole thing standing there in the back room while sweat trickled down his back and he tried to decide if _that_ looked too painful to be fun and if _that_ was something he could ever do with anyone but himself. 

  


The cashier, a sweet-faced girl, put his purchases in a plain brown bag and handed them over with a flirty smile. B.J. smiled back and thought, he wasn't married anymore, he could ask her out for drinks. She might say no; she was probably a lesbian. She only smiled at him the way waitresses call you 'sweetheart.'

  


As he rode back on the cable car, protecting his books as if their plain paper wrapper would invite violent attention, B.J. watched San Francisco at dusk. He didn't like this conflict of attraction. He loved Peg, he always would; he'd loved Aggie O'Shea; he'd lusted after plenty of women. He missed Hawkeye. The hand-drawn diagrams and descriptions in the nickel booklet were undeniably sexy. 

  


He didn't make any decisions in the weeks that followed, but not for lack of pondering as he went about his days, in his quiet moments and stressful moments, without anyone to whom to air his thoughts. He dropped the wooden nickel in the brass ashtray cast from Erin's baby feet along with the other detritus that tangled in his pockets by day's end. He thought about going to the Black Cat, but it just didn't seem that important.

  


B.J. had been doing his postgrad work when Kinsey's first report, _Sexuality and the Human Male_ , had gone through the country like a case of bedbugs. It seemed everyone was reading it but no one was talking about it. He and Peg discussed it over a bologna sandwich dinner one night, he remembered. She declared herself a 'one' in experience, but said she could see herself as maybe a 'two', if the right woman came along at the right time in her life. B.J., shocked and embarrassed, demurred to chose his own number. He knew why, now -- he had an answer, but he had been afraid to do the math. He had been a practicing 'one' with a shameful 'threeish' history. Now he appeared to be sauntering up the scale. 

  


Peg had had a point about the report: it only focused on behavior, not feelings. 

  


B.J. was pretty confused about his feelings.

  


~*~

  


[Continued in part 2](http://ficbyaura218.livejournal.com/6322.html#cutid1)


	2. Chapter 2

Hawkeye was hanging laundry when his father came hiking up the stream, holding a rope heavy with strung trout. Hawkeye tossed a glance up the lawn to his houseguest who'd come for a weekend and stayed a fortnight - Ezra Hirsch, dozing in the sun on an Adirondack chair with an afghan over his legs. There was a snap in the air, Hawkeye hated the idea of his falling in the cold water - the stream got shoulder-deep in parts - but old Doc Pierce loathed taking the longer, more boring street walk. As he came up the lawn, Hawkeye saw his dad give Ezra the long view. Hawkeye made innocent with the laundry.

"Is that dinner?" Hawkeye called by way of greeting.

"I'm not staying." Daniel Pierce handed over the fish. "He okay?"

Hawkeye held up the catch of today - two fat rainbow trout, at least eighteen inches each. "He's fine, why wouldn't he be? Are you sure you don't want to stay? I'll do a gumbo for three."

Daniel was looking at the sheets hanging on the line. "I didn't know you were close with - him."

Hawkeye propped his elbow on his hip, dangling the fish the line twisted in his fingers. "You want to come say hi?"

Daniel wiped his fish hands on his rubber hip boots. "Naw, he's asleep. Listen, don't forget to gut those beauties -"

"I know how to clean fish, Dad."

"I know you do, just don't want you to get distracted, what with your guest -" And it began.

"Why do you think a guest would distract me -"

"Now, Ben, don't get excited -"

Hawkeye could feel the argument taking over his mouth. "I wouldn't get excited if you didn't insinuate that I don't know how to do something you taught me to do when I was twelve!"

Daniel pointed a finger into Hawkeye's chest. "Now, this is why I'd rather eat your cousin's canned soup for supper than my fresh fish. The way you carry on lately, it's like you're turning into a woman."

Hawkeye turned on his heel and walked to the house. He abruptly spun and walked back. He was aware of Ezra watching him through slitted eyes.

"Keep your fish, Dad. Teach Dottie how to gut them right."

Daniel wouldn't take his gift back, which was another ten minute argument. He stalked off with the fish on the grass and shouting about ungrateful children. Hawkeye felt guilty about the gift, angry in general, and angry he felt guilty, but not guilty that he shouted back.

Ezra followed him into the kitchen. They worked silently, first cleaning up the fish; then reached mutual opinion that they may as well start dinner. Hawkeye didn't tell Ezra about the date he went on last weekend. A datey-date, with a woman, picked her up in his car, wore a suit, took her to a place with tablecloths, drove into Portland to a martini lounge. She was a young widow with a little boy whom she didn't introduce to her dates until she was "sure it was worth it." Hawkeye made an effort not to show his offense at that, but he probably didn't try hard enough. He wasn't planning on calling her again.

 _Settling down._  Settle. Down. Maybe he needed to date farther afield. There must be women in far off places who didn't conduct dates like job interviews. What happened to having a nice time with an interesting person just to get to know them better? The women he pursued weren't twenty-five anymore, that's what happened. And he wasn't interested in dating co-eds.

The fear Hawkeye felt wasn't of being with one person for a long time, not if they were the right person. It was that idea:  _Settling_.  _Down._ First you pick someone with all their flaws and you say, well, this the best I can do. I'm a thirty-five year old neurotic, skinny, small town g.p., so I'd better take what I can get. And then the second part: Downed cow, fall down, put down a sick dog. You're done. No more silliness, dancing, drinking. And kids? No more sex in the living room. No going out whenever you want. No working overtime if the little wife wants you to come home and be a husband. He'd have to be the man of the house, an upstanding member of the community. Not to mention sober.

"I'm not ready to be done," Hawkeye said aloud.

"Hm?" Ezra hardly regarded him as he gleefully stabbed the potatoes through their jackets.

"What if Dad wants me to marry Dottie," Hawkeye theorized. "It's legal - she's something like a third cousin twice removed. After all, our town was founded by forty colonists who all had each others' babies. Maybe the fish are a dowry."

"Ben, I won't be able to eat dinner if you keep talking about that woman's fishy dowry." Ezra plunked the potatoes in the oven.

"He wants what's best for me," Hawkeye pronounced like a curse.

"God protect us from those who would protect us."

Ezra dragged the corn shucking stool to the door, propped the screen open, and lit a cigar. Hawkeye had asked him not to smoke in the house many times, but it was too cold to send the man outside. And he knew Hawkeye wouldn't ask him to.

"Maybe getting married wouldn't be so bad," Hawkeye said. "Maybe . . . maybe I wouldn't miss drinking and cigars that much."

Ezra cough-laughed on his blue smoke. "Ben . . . my dear boy, my favorite woman let me drink and smoke so long as it wasn't in her parlor."

Hawkeye laughed, astonished. "You never told me you were married!"

"I wasn't, except in name. She was a widow who wasn't interested in marrying again. The best relationship I ever had. We slept in the same bed completely platonically and loved each other very much. The neighbors called us mister and missus, and we got on under that assumption. It only lasted a until the cancer took her, but it was truly the best years of my life."

This was bizarre knowledge to learn about his homo mentor this late in life.

Hawkeye said, "But Patrick -"

"Pat was a natural disaster. It's a difficult thing, living with a man."

"That was a long time ago," Hawkeye said. "People are more modern now, especially in Cal- ah - large cities."

Ezra waggled his eyebrows as he puffed his cigar. "What are you going to tell your father when you move out west?"

Hawkeye looked at him sidelong. "I'll tell him, 'guess what, Dad, I've recently received a strong blow to the head.'"

Hawkeye wiped the fish scales off the counter while Ezra smoked thoughtfully. Truth was, Dad knew what Hawkeye had gotten up to years ago, when he was a teenager. Hawkeye sometimes wondered if his father had forgotten that bottle of penicillin he'd prescribed his boy for V.D. in a telltale place, but then, Dad was no dummy. Hawkeye knew he could talk to his dad about anything, but he wasn't a kid. He had a right to privacy. Frankly, he didn't want to kill his dad with worry. Although, when Dad slung his arrows about marriage and kids a little too freely, it was on the tip of Hawkeye's tongue to put him in his place. It would feel good to have the last word over his old man, just once.

Ezra stretched out one leg and swatted Hawkeye's rear with his stocking foot. "Sweetheart, what's the worst than can happen if you tell your dad you're in love with a man? Do you think you'll die?"

Hawkeye scrubbed his eyes. Cigars always made them prickly. "No, I think I'll kill him."

Ezra puffed. "May do."

He could handle his dad. It was fine. Crabapple Cove was great, it was his home. For three years of his life, the Army kept him away. Now he just wanted to be somewhere safe and predictable. What was so bad about that?

* * *

B.J. went back to Eureka Valley another Saturday afternoon, taking a book to the Lighthouse. He talked to people, made connections. Some of them needed his professional advice, some were burgeoning friends. No one, man or woman, interested him in a deeper way. Asa and his longtime lover Oscar were pleasant conversation, or entertainment when they were bickering and Oscar refused to turn up his hearing aid. Ever since that first day, Jo served him ice tea in a chilled glass.

Finally, Jo asked point-blank what he was doing here, before she committed more gossip to the project.

"What do you mean?" B.J. tried to decide if he should laugh or run.

"Fellas have been asking about you," Bette said as she iced a coffee cake.

B.J. did laugh then. "And what do you tell them?"

"That you're all broke up from your divorce and not lookin'," Bette said.

B.J. didn't like that, exactly, but wasn't sure what answer he'd have preferred. "I don't know why I'm here."

"He's got cold feet," Oscar said.

"Cold feet nothing, tomorrow we may die," Asa said.

"You paranoid, hallucinating -" Oscar griped.

"Paranoid my fallen arches, the Ruskies have the bomb pointed at this city -!"

While Jo laid in with the old boys, Bette whispered to B.J. over the pie display.

"If you're not going to use the token, Asa's going to want it back," she said quietly.

"I don't understand. Don't I turn it in like a ticket?"

Bette shook her head so her curls bounced under her kerchief. She was in a blue shirtwaist dress today. "There's only ten tokens, total, floating around the city. The owner gives them out to people he trusts to give to new guys. If you aren't going to use it, you should pass it on to someone else. Lots of guys want in at the Black Cat."

B.J. folded his arms. "Why is this place so exclusive?"

"Safety," Bette said. "The token means you're vetted and sponsored. They know you're not a cop or a straight man looking to make trouble."

B.J. laughed. "But Jo when got me the token that first day - you hardly talked to me."

Bette smiled. "Oh, no. We were watching you for blocks. We know a terrified new guy from a mile away."

Bette left him in his shock and flattery. This subculture was like being in a different country or a spy movie. Agent Hunnicutt, 007, homo avenger. He smiled to himself.

"He doesn't want to go because he's met some fella!" Asa shouted into Oscar's hearing aid.

B.J. turned on his counter stool. "I have not! Will everyone please back off? I'll go when I'm ready."

Bette idled over to him, innocently filling the salt shakers from a pitcher. "So you  _don't_  have a boyfriend?"

"No," B.J. said. "Well. . . . No, I guess not. There's someone, but he's on the other side of the country."

Bette lifted her wide, brown eyes up at him, and looked back down. B.J. twirled his pie crust with his fork.

"Really," B.J. said. "I don't think he's interested. He's got a great job in Maine and his dad to look after."

"Mm hmm," Bette said.

"We met in the war. Korea. We were doctors," B.J. said.

Suddenly he missed Hawkeye as much as he had the night Hawkeye got out of bed and said it didn't mean anything - as much as that afternoon, a week later, when B.J. got on a plane and left Hawkeye behind on the tarmac. He was angry, too - how dare Hawkeye tell him it was okay to be a homosexual and then just abandon him with this knowledge, kick him out of the garden, the safety of his bed and his arms.

B.J. was spilling this at the counter to Bette and any eavesdroppers, and all subsequent links on the gossip chain, all about the 4077th and Hawkeye, the long hours, how close their bunks were, the jokes they played together, the generals they went up against together, how they'd drank together and cried together. Somehow, he realized that the people in this diner had become his friends. He trusted them with this important part of his life. The businessmen who had ignored him were Marthan and Jacob, European immigrants, very protective of one another, who just yesterday came into B.J.'s hospital for some routine work - they trusted him that much.

"Oscar and Asa met in the war." Jo nodded to them.

"They've been together since - since their war?" B.J. goggled at them. Over thirty years . . .

Bette folded her arms on the counter and looked up at him. "Do you think that's impossible?"

B.J. wrote Hawkeye that night. It was a long letter. He didn't exactly know what he was trying to say, but the words kept coming.

_I guess I just want you to know that I'm okay, but I'm not the same B.J. you knew. I feel like I'm finding all this life I never would have seen or experienced if you hadn't taken me to that bar. I feel guilty that so much of my time is being taken away from Erin, as if I should atone for my broken marriage by spending all my free time with her. I do see her as much as possible , I wasn't there for her first two years, I'm not going to miss a minute of the rest of her life. But, I don't know, Hawk, it's like I'm eighteen again and I've just moved to the city and - ~~~~~ I wish I could put it all down. You've got to come out here and see it all._

B.J. expected a quick reply, but after a month, he forgot to be disappointed when none came.


	3. Chapter 3

Dottie's husband was home from the Merchant Marines for Christmas, so the Pierces converged on her small house for a big holiday dinner on the 24th. Bill, Hawkeye's cousin and childhood hero, was there. Hawkeye had never told Bill or anyone else what he told Sidney Freedman when he started having psycho-somatic sneezing fits in Korea. He just didn't think anyone would take a thirty year old trauma seriously, so he kept it to himself. Bill was oblivious that any time had passed since they played as children; in a lot of ways, Bill was astonishingly simple. Hawkeye wondered if his cousin had ever discovered that his best friend from college had been Hawkeye's first boyfriend. Probably not. Hawkeye imagined the chaos he could cause by telling him - perhaps over mulled wine and chestnuts after the children were tucked into their beddy-bies - with the wanton glee of a pyromaniac sizing up a paper factory.

Bill tried to engage Hawkeye in a sociopolitical debate about the appropriateness of the French occupation of Vietnam. Hawkeye was impressed.  _Someone_ had been reading his  _National Geographic_. Hawkeye wondered why it took him this long to notice that Billy didn't talk so much as perform. He wife hovered at his elbow, fetched him a drink, and didn't have any evident opinions she cared to express on her own. Hawkeye bitterly regretted any Pierce family similarities between them, and vowed to stop talking trying so hard to be the loudest person in the room all the time.

"I don't know, Bill," Hawkeye answered his cousin's persistence, "I guess I just feel that democratic bullets are less useful than a Communist blanket. Or a school - or a food market. Excuse me."

Dottie's youngest was screeching. Hawkeye picked up the kid whose droopy drawers informed all that a loaded diaper was coming through. (He'd worked in Bellevue, poopy children had nothing on poopy old people.) He held the toddler in front of him, enjoyed watching Bill flee, and took the kid into the quiet nursery. At least stinky two year olds knew that killing is bad.

Hawkeye tried not to think of other babies as he wiped and powdered his nephew's bottom, kissed his hands and made faces. Not just the kid from the bus - oh no, his talented brain could torture him coming and going, eight ways to deliverance. There was the Amerasian baby he'd left at the monastery in that bare wooden cradle (in his nightmares, the child was ignored and died of thirst as he drove away); undersized infants he'd delivered to undernourished prostitutes; starving babies failing to thrive in families who couldn't feed their older children, but he wasn't allowed to distribute prophylactics to prevent the conception of another burden.

Dottie's toddler was pink, healthy, with a curly tuft of blonde hair and bright, round, blue eyes. He'd want for nothing his whole life. He even got squares of store-bought cloth just to be pinned on his tushie, a bin to keep the dirty ones, and they were taken away by a driven delivery service every few days. Such a wealth of resources devoted to the business of poop.

And there was mined, powdered talc for his butt kept in a cardboard canister, more toys bought for this third child than the town of Uijeongbu ever saw, tiny t-shirts and a lace christening gown, furniture built just for this brief period of his life. The consumerism was obscene. So many  _things_ bought for one tiny creature. Why was this child so precious and other children got by without enough milk or clothing? Hawkeye lifted his clean and diapered nephew onto his shoulder, knowing in his bones that this child who wrapped his hand around his tie was special and wonderful. Just as every Korean woman knew about her own children.

The toddler was too excited by the holiday to be held. He wriggled and wanted down. Hawkeye set him on his feet and he toddled past all his toys, out the door, to the hall and the people, spotting the nibbles arrayed on the coffee table in the living room.

So Hawkeye wasn't his engaging self at the Pierce family get-together. Some - his great-aunt, for one - would even call him rude. When Uncle Horrace came home from France with half his leg shot off, they gave his moods a pass. But Hawkeye's problems were invisible. He had nightmares; who didn't. He didn't like being around kids; he was a bachelor, he wasn't expected to like children. He wasn't fun; well, they said, he'd get back to his old self soon. Just like that, like there was a button.

It was family. They loved him in that way you love someone you saw grow up but only talked to about work and everyone's health and occasionally monstrous, devastating tragedies. He hadn't even written to a lot of the cousins and second-uncles during his soldiering years. He intended to write everyone as a way of getting out the word of the injustice of the war, but eventually whittled down to Dad and sometimes Dottie. Not even Bill, who told him to buck up and do his bit against the Commie hoard. He was tired - or drunk - and when he had time to put pen to paper, he didn't know what to say to most of them. "Today I dug through fifteen digestive systems and I think I've got mildew in my toes again." Only his dad would see the humor in that. If Hawkeye couldn't entertain someone with his letters, he'd have opened a vein with the nib of his fountain pen.

There comes a time, Hawkeye thought as he prowled the periphery of the living room, when home is the place you don't fit in. Why couldn't he sit down with Dottie's husband and watch football? Because the drone and the noise made him jumpy. He didn't like television, it made him feel guilty, like he should be doing something more important instead of sitting there passive. He didn't want to babysit the kids or talk to Dottie, whose conversations led back to children. He felt the memory of his nephew in his arms and cringed. He missed liking children, hoped one day he could again. He wasn't sure if he wanted his own, but he didn't like not wanting children because of something that happened to him.

This day was really getting to be too much. He found his dad alone in the study.

"I was waiting for you to come in," Dad said.

Hawkeye filched his cigar without asking. A whole one of these was poison to his dad's heart. Dad didn't argue, at least not verbally; they bickered in body language and telepathy borne of twenty-five years together.

Dad said, "Son, you have become a shell of the capable man I used to be proud of."

Hawkeye was expecting something like that. "Terribly sorry, Dad, I'll try to fill up my shell to everyone's satisfaction. How's a pastry bag for a filling device sound to you?"

"Don't be smart."

"Can't help it, was born too smart."

"You certainly were," Dad said to the ceiling. "When are you going to stop playing around?"

Hawkeye flopped into an overstuffed chair. All this reunioning had put him in an adolescent mood. "What's eating you?"

Dad didn't have to look at him for Hawkeye to feel pinned by his accusation. "You are. I've never seen you with this zero ambition - this laziness. What are you doing here, Ben? Is this your life now? Lancing infected boils and delivering babies in a small town?"

"Well, why not? It was good enough for you."

Dad reached over, snatched the cigar dangling from Hawkeye's fingers, and pointed at him with it. "Listen, kid. I've never told you this and if you bring it up later, I'll say I was drunk: Every man wants to see his boy do fifty percent more interesting things than he did. You're better than this town. You're better than private practice. I didn't go to a top drawer research school, I went to state that didn't even have a teaching hospital. And I sure as hell didn't intern at the best goddamned hospitals in New York and Chicago."

"Dad, there's nothing wrong with -"

"So help me, Ben, if you stay here I'll find a way to have your medical licensed revoked, if that's what it takes to get you out from underneath my shadow. If you have to start at Bellevue washing bedpans, I know you'll bounce back. But not if you're spinning your wheels here."

Hawkeye wanted a drink. He covered his eyes with his palm. "What if I go crazy and choke and get fired?" What if I try to kill myself and spend the rest of my life in the bin?

Dad sat on the arm of Hawkeye's chair. "Then you'll come home. Or I'll go out and stay with you until you feel better."

Hawkeye looked up, amazed. "You would do that?"

"Don't you know you're the most important person in my life?"

Hawkeye flopped over into his father's lap. Dad laughed and ruffled his hair like Mom used to. "You're the wonderfullest dad in the world," he said through the lump in his throat.

Dad laughed. "I know. And you will be too."

Hawkeye sighed. "Dad . . ."

Hawkeye started with the bus. It felt good to tell someone other than a doctor; it made the awful night seem smaller, less important. That baby's death hadn't been his fault, if only he could remember not to feel guilty about it. Think of all the babies you saved, his dad pointed out; it wasn't the point, but it was something. Dad, who had a pretty big ego himself, honed in on that Pierce's failing in logic: it was pretty arrogant to think that his trauma was the biggest thing in the picture. What about the mother who had to carry her grief and guilt her entire life? If Hawkeye was feeling badly, he ought to remember her burden.

The bus led to B.J. Not everything, just enough clue Dad to the concept that Hawkeye's youthful experimentations weren't youthful and were so much practical training for later; Hawkeye explained about Trapper, too. No, it wasn't wartime stress, there had been men in peacetime - don't tell Billy. And there had been plenty of women. Somehow, Hawkeye thought the conversation would have been easier if he was only interested in men.

Hawkeye hadn't been afraid of telling him, exactly, but was sorry for bursting his dad's dreams of grandchildren.

"Why are you telling me this now?" Dad said. "Do you have - a special kind of friend?"

Hawkeye couldn't help laughing. His scientific father sounded like a Victorian maiden aunt. "Because this isn't going to go away, Dad. I know you always thought I'd just grow up and get married, have kids - I mean, I really have tried, I know you wanted me to be a nice, normal guy with a family -"

Dad smoothed his hair as if Hawkeye was a child. "Son, no. I want you to live your own life, not Bill's or mine. Why do you think I'm trying to throw you out of town?"

Hawkeye laughed. "Well, gee, Dad, I was thinking you wanted your monopoly back."

"No, just my house - mostly my kitchen. If I have another boiled cabbage and roast beef supper of Dottie's, I may choke."

Hawkeye went serious. "Does she make liver and fish?"

Dad considered his response. "I think I best protect you from the truth."

Hawkeye moaned. "When I get to Chicago, I'll send you real food - a gallon of sauce and a whole rack of ribs."

"Don't forget -"

"- the coleslaw," they said together.

Hawkeye reached into his jacket pocket. "Dad . . . there's something else. You remember when B.J. was here?"

In his hand was his most recent letter from Beej, postmarked almost a month ago. Hawkeye hadn't opened it. He didn't know what to do about his old friend. Dad didn't need all the details to know these weren't flighty feelings his son was having.

"What does your, ah,  _friend_  Ezra think?" Dad said.

Hawkeye eyebrowed him. "Dad, Ezra and I have never slept together."

Dad let out a breath. "Oh, thank god. Ben, I just don't like that man, never have. I know you two are close and he's been a good friend to this family, but there's things that happened before you were born - there's reasons he had to run away to New York when we were young, he gave a girl a terrible reputation."

"Because he's queer?" Hawkeye interrupted.

Daniel shook his head. "No - he lived with a woman, he's not a homosexual. I wish you wouldn't use crude words."

Hawkeye laughed. "Dad, Ezra is more flaming than a forest fire. Lots of queer men were married at some point in their lives - B.J. just got divorced."

Dad stole back his cigar and took a long drag. "This is getting better and better. Are you sure this is a good idea? Getting involved with a nearly-married man?"

Hawkeye propped his chin on the heel of his hand. "Who said I'm involved?"

"You did, when you carried that letter in your pocket for -" Dad looked at the postmark, "- a month. I just don't know what kind of life you can expect to have with this boy. Be realistic now. Do you think you can show up on his doorstop and confess your heart to him? He's got a child, Hawkeye. I just don't think a man in his situation will throw caution to the wind, take you in . . . aw, hell. Ben?"

The room faded away. Instead, Hawkeye saw a green - no, yellow - house turned golden in the California sun. He saw mornings with pancakes, evenings with martinis and records, long Sunday afternoons in bed. Saw himself reading bedtime stories to a school-aged little girl in her jammies. Remembered a standing invitation.

"The world doesn't spin on love, Ben."

But Hawkeye didn't hear his father. He wandered out to the snowy porch as he read the letter in the glow of the Christmas lights.


	4. Chapter 4

Just after the New Year of 56, four months after Hawkeye shook up B.J.'s world like a snowglobe, B.J. entered a queer bar on his own for the first time.

Not that he'd kept himself completely on the shelf. He'd talked to a lot of people who he met at the Lighthouse. He read a lot of books. There was a night at the beach, that man who took him into the woods for a very hurried hand-job. . . .

B.J. reread the nickel pamphlet he'd bought so long ago (had one off to calm his nerves), put a tiny tube of slippery stuff in his pocket, and in his distraction almost left without the token. He checked his suit in the hall mirror. He started to take off the tie, and then straightened it again. He didn't like skinny ties, they looked funny on him because he was so tall, but they were the style, apparently. Would there be other men in suits? In B.J.'s world, one wore a suit nearly everywhere. His closet offered him selections on the themes of: work clothes, dinner jackets, and Saturday stuff. He wished he had Hawkeye to dress him. Or Klinger. Maybe he could call him up in Korea: "Hello, old friend, what does one wear to a homosexual drinking establishment?"

He'd probably have an answer.

B.J. sighed. Well, to approach the problem deductively: he was too old to wear dungarees outside the neighborhood, he was sure the dinner jacket look was too much, but you really couldn't go wrong with a nice, charcoal suit.

The Black Cat was closer to home than Eureka Valley and in a sketchy neighborhood. B.J. took a cab to the general area and walked precipitously downhill from the noisy, bustling red light district on Broadway. It was stupidly less embarrassing to tell the cabbie to take him to the strip clubs than a homo club. The side streets were quieter, lined with Chinese restaurants and shared wall apartment buildings. He counted building numbers until he found it. His destiny jutted into the center of a five point intersection, one of those triangular corner buildings. Music leaked into the street. No signs or lights marked it from any other apartment building on the block, save the angry-looking bouncer the approximate size of a bull.

"Hi," B.J. said.

The bouncer looked at him like he was halfway interesting lint.

"Um, I have a token." B.J. fished it out of his pocket.

The bouncer's sudden smile turned him into the family bulldog. "You don't give that to me, sweetie, give it to the bartender." Toto held the door for him.

And he was in. He was stopped in the vestibule by a woman (not a woman) done up as a Rockette who took an expensive cover from him - legal costs, she explained without explaining. She dismissed him as another group crowded behind him and they started a loud conversation.

The club was bigger than it looked on the outside. B.J. felt underdressed, ordinary. He kept Asa's token in his hand, waiting for someone to demand proof to legitimate his existence. Tasseled chandeliers choked the ceiling, a wide creaking stage took up at one end, there were fringed tablecloths and a dingy bandstand; the style was retro-deco, lots of cut glass and geometric mosaics. It all had a faded debutante feel. But the real decoration was the people: you come to the Black Cat to see and be seen.

Beatniks, more than B.J. had ever seen in one place. They had colonized one corner, sitting on tables and each other, talking over one another and waving papers and notebooks. The next lost generation, or so these kids imagined. On stage was a man dressed more elaborately like a woman than a woman would ever bother. S-he looked like a Vegas showgirl, with the wings and boa, and did a torch number with obscene, accurate lyrics.

Hawkeye would love this place, B.J. thought; the man was a people-vampire, he sucked up energy from a party and became a bright, shining star at the center of it. B.J. knew he was witty and no social slouch, but he didn't even know how to get a word in with such theatrical people and wasn't sure he wanted to.

"B.J.! Oh, B.J. Hunnicutt!" a creaky voice sang out.

Someone knew him here? B.J. turned. A giant bird in a sparkly dress was waving its wing at him. B.J. squinted in the shimmer off the rhinestones. Oh, my God . . .

"Asa?"

Asa and Oscar, as women. Sort of. Curiously, wearing tags that read "We are boys" on their frighteningly fishnetted thighs. B.J. joined them out of curiosity.

"What happened to you?" B.J. said.

Oscar was 'me-me-me'ing his octaves.

"Dear boy, don't make Oscar nervous, we're about to be stars." Asa was transformed. Not a grumpy old veteran of war and life, but a saucy grandma.

"You look . . . very theatrical," B.J. said.

"We've been doing this since vaudeville," Asa said. "Of course, get up as girls now and you'll go down in the clink." He slapped the tag on his thigh. His nails were long and painted. B.J. suppressed a shudder. "They make us wear these ugly stickers to tell the coppers we're not trying to fool anyone. Just like the old days!"

"Without the branding," Oscar said.

"Only if you're nice," Asa said.

B.J. didn't want to know.

"Look, honey," Asa's hands shooed him. "Go get a drink, tell Prince - the pretty Mexican boy - you have my token, he'll set you up right."

The two fluttered on stage to do "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" as a sensual, tottering duet.

By chance, 'Prince' the bartender - "It's 'Luis,' sir, Asa can't hear over the bombs in his mind" - did know B.J.'s patron and accepted the token. B.J. was introduced to the staff as they came by, asked what he was doing in the city, if he was living here or visiting, and generally welcomed as a new member of the fold. B.J., for his part, was happy to sip a beer and observe. This place was like the final days of the Roman Empire as depicted by Suetonius and the circus.

Despite the theatrics, he didn't see any same-sex dancing or kissing. No one was holding hands or standing too closely. In fact, he saw Luis stare down a couple of lesbians who were getting too handsy. The cops knew about this place, despite the token system, B.J. realized. He understood now why the cover charge went towards "legal."

Asa and Oscar finished their set and declared B.J. their new "fag adoptee." They decreed it was a crime for a handsome man to sit alone and sat him at their booth between their costumed friends. He felt like the only mammal in a tropical bird's nest. They drank hard alcohol and talked interpersonal politics - gossip - of their community. My community, B.J. thought. The people being evicted from their apartments and defending their businesses against obscenity charges were homosexuals, just like he was. B.J. wasn't familiar with the issues they were discussing , but he felt outraged at every topic they brought up.

To his left, another man wasn't doing much talking. He looked Italian, maybe, dressed in a pinstripe suit, crossed legs and holding a martini.

"Awfully worked up, aren't they?" B.J. said.

"Oh, honey, please."

B.J. didn't know what to say to that. Beside the Italian man sat a bald man with a goatee. He wrapped one arm around his Italian-looking friend.

"Darling, I think Mary's a virgin," said the bald man.

B.J. looked over his shoulder. "Who?"

Italian man said, "She thinks she's at the picture shows."

B.J. suddenly felt unwelcome. He started to stand. "I think I'll freshen my drink."

Asa's attention was suddenly turned to him. "Sit, sit, we'll get a waitress. Don't mind Salvatore and Gabe, someone just dropped a house on their sister."

The Italian one hissed like a cat. B.J. got it. They were another brand of Hawkeye or Leo - jokes to establish the in-group. He understood now how mean that could be to people who weren't in on the joke.

"The one with species confusion is Salvatore," Oscar said. "The one whose hair moved south is Gabe."

"Charmed," Gabe said. He nodded his bald head. Salvatore in the pinstripe suit shook B.J.'s hand.

"In the Army, 'Mary' was a spy," B.J. hazarded conversation.

"Oh, she's a serviceman," the Italian man said.

"Formerly," B.J. said.

"Aren't we all," Salvatore said.

"Of something," Gabe finished.

B.J. shook his head. From the mouths of crazy people . . . "That's very astute."

"Come now," Salvatore said as a waitress drifted near. "Have a drink with your aunties."

"We want to know simply everything about you," Gabe said. B.J. felt like he was making friends with Tweedles Dee and Dum.

"I, well, to start, I don't know what I'm doing here," B.J. confessed.

The two men laughed. "Who does! We're all just confused, scared loners looking for someone to call home for a night."

"I was married," B.J. continued. "I have a little girl."

The two crooned at that, asked after her age and favorite color.

"But I just got divorced. I mean, it was just finalized. Today. I'm done. Free."

"Well, ring the damn bell!" Salvatore said.

"Salvatore was married," Gabe said.

"It was an affliction, like the 'flu."

B.J. shrugged at his martini. "I liked being married. I liked my wife."

"How long were you together?"

"Four years."

The two men looked at one another. "And how long were you in Korea?"

B.J. took a long drink. "Two. And a little."

"Uh huh," Salvatore said. "Honey, that's not a wife, that's a pen pal."

"Hey!" B.J. said.

"Delicate as a nuclear rocket, this one." Gabe rolled his eyes. "He means some of us can play pretend longer when we're far away from the thing we're avoiding, you know?"

B.J. thought. "What do you mean?"

"Well, like they say, absence makes the heart invent fondness."

"I mean," B.J. said, "do lots of homosexual men marry women?"

Gabe pulled an overdramatic face. "Oh, honey, are you living under a moonrock? Like that - Sal, what was that movie, about the fishy aliens that lived in the moon-cave? That's what he is, he's a fish-alien."

B.J. was still picking at this idea. He wasn't a unique kind of domestic monster, like a laundry sock demon or an under-bed child eater. He ruined his marriage, but had other guys done the same thing? Might there be an explanation for his behavior besides pure selfishness or weakness or lack or morals? If so, maybe his inner Jiminy Cricket could see fit to letting him off the hook for the destruction his wanton abandonment wrought.

"Why do they do it?" B.J. said.

"Well, why did you?" Salvatore said.

"I . . . don't know how to answer that," B.J. said. I left my family because I'm a selfish person.

"Yes you do," Salvatore said. "You reached a point that you couldn't lie to yourself anymore. Not just when you stopped wanting her, but when the idea of being with her for life scared the living shit out of you. Did you lay awake at night and feel the future sitting on your chest like a iron block?"

"You're so dramatic-" Gabe started.

But B.J. said, "Yes."

Gabe looked away from his lover to B.J., surprised.

"I did," B.J. said. "I used to walk along the bluffs because I couldn't breathe. And I think I was looking at . . . freedom. Open sky and the big, wide ocean."

In his peripheral vision, B.J. was aware that Asa and the other brightly costumed men has moved off to another table. Sal and Gabe had sacrificed their fun night to comfort him. How many people would do that for a stranger? They were drunk old men saying pretty words, but the words felt so true. B.J. could hear his old pastor give warning: the devil dresses up lies like pretty truths. But when was the last time the church's God had given him any comforting goodness? Years - a lifetime since he became a soldier. Maybe the path he was seeking led through his own heart - the knowledge he felt to be as true and real as the faith he felt in himself.

Gabe covered B.J.'s hand. "Do you still feel frightened at night?"

B.J. nodded. "Sometimes. Often. Almost every night."

Gabe plucked Sal's lapel. "Honey, do you have . . ."

Sal pulled a card out of his jacket. He squeezed B.J.'s hand as he passed it. "That's our psychiatrist. You can trust him."

Meaning the psychiatrist was a homosexual, B.J. understood; he didn't confine his homo patients to hospitals or force barbaric "treatment" on them; B.J. could confess his deepest-darkest without fear the doc would report back to his family, employer, or the police. B.J. glanced at the card and put it in his own pocket. Even if he didn't need another shrink, just the name was more precious than a magic amulet found in a dragon's lair.

"Thank you," B.J. said. "But I don't know if a shrink can help me."

"He's got guilt," Gabe said.

"Leave him alone," Salvatore said.

"I don't have guilt," B.J. said.

"You do so," Gabe said. "Peaches, your marriage was going to break up anyway. Or else it wouldn't have."

"Everyone deserves love and passion - sex is a mitzvah," Sal said. "If you aren't loving and desiring your wife, then you were breaking your marriage vows the same as if you had gone to bed with someone. If you can't do that for her, then you should let her free to find a relationship where she is loved, cherished, and desired."

"Everyone deserves to get off," Gabe said.

 _"Daily_ ," Salvatore said.

B.J. laughed.

"At least," Sal said. "And with the person they love. If that's a man for you, then let it be a man. We are sexual creatures - we're not homosexual or heterosexual, we're just sexual. And there's nothing wrong with exploring that."

"And a lot of things wrong with repressing it," Gabe put in.

"So!" Gabe and Sal slapped either of B.J.'s thighs at the same time. He jumped and spilled his drink.

"With whom shall we send you home tonight?" Sal and Gabe turned him around in his chair.

"Darling in the denims has been watching you," Gabe said. He unsubtly smoothed Sal's hair behind his ear and gestured to a man over Sal's shoulder - a boy, really, a delinquent leaning against the bar with his motorcycle boot friends.

"I don't think so," B.J. said.

"What do you like?" Gabe said.

"They're all here," Sal said.

"Like a deli counter."

This was getting disturbing. B.J. didn't often pick people out of a crowd.

"I don't know . . ." B.J. scanned the crowd, or what was left of it. Nothing stood out. "Tall, I guess. Not too much smaller than me. Dark hair. . . ."

"Well, this deli is closing soon, so how about the next capicola who wanders over?" Salvatore said.

"Huh?"

The two older men slipped out of the booth. Leaving B.J. alone with the hero type who just crossed the floor to make his spirited campaign.

"Hi, I'm Chris."

He had a slender build, a boy next door face, close cropped copper curls and wore glasses. He wasn't dressed like a woman or a cockatoo.

"Hi, I'm B.J."

"Buy you a drink?" He spoke with a New York accent and looked decently intelligent.

"Sure."

Though B.J.'s house was a seventy cent cab ride away, he didn't volunteer it. Chris "knew a place," took his car to a reservoir. He kissed like it was a competition and he had his clothes off faster than he wanted B.J.'s off. B.J didn't want to get fully undressed anyway, fearing cops would suddenly emerge from the dark like The Shadow.

It was awkward. It was practice sex. B.J. had enough halfway through and asked to be driven home.

They didn't speak on the drive to North Beach. He wasn't upset. He didn't expect a stranger who approached him in a club to rock his world off its axis; that hadn't been the point. Chris reinforced his belief that intimacy was more important than sex - that friendship meant more than making it. The point was, there were other homos out there and he could be a part of that community and not die. He could have a sex life without Peggy or even Hawkeye and enjoy it. He wasn't doomed to alcoholism and suicide. He could have a good life.

It was in that mood that he found Hawkeye Pierce washed up on his doorstep.

* * *

_Dec. 25, 1955_

_Dear B.J. -_

_First of all, I'm sorry. I told myself bringing you to that dodgy bar was helping you, but I think I was doing something self-serving and cruel. I'm sorry. You weren't ready for all that homo noise and I pushed myself on you and probably ruined our friendship. I wasn't myself, I was going through something. I haven't written because I was so angry and ashamed of myself and, well, cards on the table - I may appear the confident Lothario, but I was just as scared as you said I was._

_I just want you to know that's the real reason I haven't written and how sorry I am. I hope you can forgive me. I guess that's all I have to say. If still taking applications for friendship, I'm applying. I hope you answer this but I understand if you can't._

_How are you? You don't know how many nights I counted ceiling tiles and wondered about you. Erin must be starting kindergarten now. Did you work it out with Peg?_

_a. m. l.,_   
_Hawkeye_

* * *

While B.J. stood in his Spartan living room reading the letter, Hawkeye fidgeted in the center of his pile of luggage. He looked like a witch about to be burned at the stake, his mess the kindling. Hawkeye always traveled heavy.

B.J. closed the letter. "It didn't work out with Peg. Didn't you get my postcard?"

Hawkeye shook his head. "I've been a little out of it."

B.J. studied him. "Are you okay?"

Hawkeye shrugged. "I'm much better now."

"What happened?" B.J. sunk down onto the sagging couch, his only living room furniture. There wasn't a lot of extra money for filling up a new house.

Hawkeye looked away, nervous. Before he could start babbling, B.J. said, "Hawkeye, it's late, if you're not going to give me a straight answer, I'd like to just got to bed."

Hawkeye moved fast for a man weighed down by his belongings. "No, wait! Beej, look, I just need a place to stay, okay? That's all."

" _Why_? What is this, Hawk? Did you think you could put a bookmark in me and we'd be at the same place when you picked me up again? Do you have any idea what I've been going through out here? Obviously not, if you haven't been reading my letters."

B.J. shoved off the couch, past Hawkeye.

"Of course not!" Hawkeye said. "I'm not asking for anything - except, obviously, room and board."

B.J. turned around, squinting in the bright hallway light. "You want board, too?"

Hawkeye affected that stance B.J. now knew to recognize as 'camp.' "Just a little board. A toothpick. You can't spare a toothpick for the guy who kept you blind and insensate the entire Korean war?"

B.J. folded his arms, stared at the scuffed toes of his brown leather shoes. "Pick up your gear." He walked upstairs, not bothering to see if Hawkeye followed. He was too goddamned tired for hostessing.

"I can stay?"

"I've got a spare room."

"Thank y-!"

"Expect a chore list with your breakfast in the morning. In fact, make  _me_  breakfast, I'm feeling peckish in six hours."

Hawkeye followed B.J. up the stairs. On the landing, B.J. turned, nearly bumping into the overloaded, skinny man.

"Hawk?"

Hawkeye gazed up at him, wide, sleepy eyes unfocused. "I told my dad everything. I was such an idiot."

"For telling him?" B.J. said.

Hawkeye's grin broke across his face. "No. For not telling him sooner."

~

* * *

~

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a/n: Thanks to the William Way Center in Philadelphia for the research.


End file.
